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Thursday 28 May 2009 19.01 EDT
First published on Thursday 28 May 2009 19.01 EDT

Hmmm ... I feel like I've done this wrong. My first playlist and it's filled with some of the biggest names in popular music. Leonard Cohen? Hardly unheralded. Marvin Gaye? Sounds familiar. Radiohead? Hardly pushing the boundaries with that one.

To each of those criticisms, levelled against me by the voices in my head, I plead guilty - but I am unrepentant.

The things is, the future is a tricky concept to grasp. It could mean songs in the future tense. Or, indeed, stories about events yet to pass. Many recommendations were along those lines. Yet Rob Fitzpatrick's parting words last week were that chosen songs should explain "what [the future's] really going to be like". This playlist complies with his wishes.

Top of the list of songs seeking to articulate what's coming over the hill is Cohen's, who captures the prevailing mood of the list, a dystopic one. "Give me crack and anal sex/ Take the only tree that's left/ Stuff it up the hole in your culture," he sings, all as the girls go do-de-do in the background. It's unclear whether Cohen's "little Jew who wrote the Bible" is speaking from the future or just of it, but the listener is left in no doubt as to the authority of the vision.

The apocalypse is just as guaranteed in Nina Simone's 22nd Century, but the song's swirling incantations - "Man became his eagle, man became his evil" - seem all the more striking for being part of such an awesome and beautiful piece of music. I had never heard this song before and it made my jaw drop. Thanks, recommenders.

Radiohead and Blur offer dispiriting but less doomy versions of the near future, both delivered in wry 90s fashion. "No one here is alone/Satellites in every home," sings Damon Albarn over that wonderful hook (recently used to advertise British Gas). Thom Yorke, meanwhile, makes the following invitation on a track originally released as the B side to No Surprises: "Meet the boss, meet the wife/Everybody's happy/Everyone is made for life."

Talking Heads, accompanied by Kirsty MacColl and Johnny Marr, take a customarily ironic approach, imagining a future in which the wonders of capitalism have been trodden down by nature, leading David Byrne to yelp: "If this was paradise I wish I had a lawnmower!" The Yardbirds, meanwhile, contemplate the planet being turned to desert. Marvin Gaye's future is a far sexier one - "we gonna be getting down on the moon" - with reefers from Venus to boot, which still sounds dystopian to me.

On the blog, LiberalCynic made the case for including Donna Summer's I Feel Love not because it is about the future (it isn't) but because, as a piece of electronic disco, it actually was the future. I Feel Love has made the playlist before, but The Future by Model 500, aka Detroit's Juan Atkins, means a slice of techno makes the list in its stead. Deltron 3030 both sound like the future and rap about it, too, while no list of musical visionaries would be complete without Zager and Evans, whose opus will still be played in the year 2525. If man is still alive, that is.